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Detox Step 2: Remove Unused Access

Sep 16, 2010Jody Brazil

There is an old riddle about firewall management -

Question: What goes in but never comes out?

Answer: A firewall rule!

Most organizations have well established methods and procedures for adding rules into a firewall, but very few organizations have strategies for removing rules that no longer serve a legitimate business purpose. If you are a firewall administrator, see if you can remember the last time someone in you company called you and said, Hey, remember that rule I had you add 6 months ago, I'm done with that project now, you can delete the rule. Contrast that with how often you have been told, You have to make this change right now, the business depends on it. It's no wonder firewall policies grow out of control.Of course, there are many reasons a firewall rule becomes obsolete:

A contractor needed some access and the contract is now over

A network was migrated to a different location when a department switched buildings

An application was upgraded and the legacy client / server protocol was replaced with a new HTTP interface

A hosted application was migrated to the cloud

A business partnership was terminated

And many more....

Regardless of the reason, rules that no longer serve a business purpose should be removed to both reduce policy complexity and remove the risk associated with the access. Consider an application in the DMZ that has been taken off-line and the firewall team was not notified. Some days or months later, that IP address is reused for a new system. Whatever access was permitted to the old system is now open to the new system putting it and the organization at risk.

Of course the best solution is a business process that ensures this never happens. It is worth pursuing this and making rule expiration, rule review and a comprehensive rule aging process part of firewall management. However, it is also worth implementing a technology solution to identify any rules that slip through that process.

Identifying unused rules or objects is difficult as they are not technically incorrect and static analysis of a policy will not reveal the problem without tremendous environmental knowledge. To identify these rules and objects, it is necessary to analyze the active policy against the actual network traffic patterns. By associating firewall access logs with the rule that generated them, it is possible to identify most used rules, which objects are used in a rule and perhaps most importantly, which rules are never used. Once identified, these rules can be removed to reduce policy complexity and improve security.

By no means is this sufficient to fully clean up or validate a policy. Just because a rule is in use does not justify the access it permits. However, this is a very good step in cleaning up a firewall to remove the access that is neither used or needed.

Removing these unused access rules is just one step towards detoxing your firewall.

Events

Webinars

Traditional security models are all about the current state – but in the current state of cyber-security, by the time new rules are written, they’re obsolete. Resources have changed, topologies have shifted, traffic has evolved, and applications grew new arms and legs.

Most organizations that I talk to still have their networks designed for 90's era attacks. A hard perimeter and little to nothing on the inside. The one common exception is the part of the network that processes credit card data since PCI DSS specifically identifies the Cardholder Data Network (CDN) and requires controls around it.

Join David Monahan, managing research director at leading IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), and discover the difference between organizations using an SPOA solution to manage their firewall environments versus those not using one of these solutions.

Using Security Policy And Automation (SPOA) Tools To Reduce The Attack Surface

Attack surfaces have expanded greatly in the past several years, in part because of the amount of new applications coming online via Internet of Things and increasingly connected technology. Organizations have an admittedly tough time keeping up with all the new touchpoints and the rapid expansion of the attack surface. Complete defense is nearly impossible, and many companies struggle with visibility issues, mismatched or misaligned firewall policies, and an inability to comprehensively test the security configurations they do have

Cloud technology gives enterprises faster application deployment, instant storage, workload versatility and pricing models that decrease initial capital investment. It is no wonder enterprises are making the move to the cloud.

Migrations run the risk of cost overrun, delays and disruption of network service - often due to a lack of personnel and process to efficiently and effectively manage. To ensure a successful migration, consider these four key factors: 1) identifying and removing technical mistakes, 2) removing unused access, 3) refining and organizing what remains and 4) continuous, real-time monitoring.

Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) continues to be a difficult practice for organizations the world over. In the last 20 years, network security policies (e.g. firewall rules) have grown by more than 3,500%. Yes, you read that number correctly. Why is that?

Gartner research has uncovered a number of security policy challenges for enterprises. Among these challenges are the typical assessments necessary to fortify policy for compliance and improved security posture.

Welcome to the world of overflowing regulations and compliance standards, of evolving infrastructure and the ever-present breach. It's a world where 72% of security and compliance personnel say their jobs are more difficult today than just two years ago.

Firewall technology has come a long way since its initial, most rudimentary forms. Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) are the latest development, and organizations are accelerating adoption to the new technology. But NGFWs aren’t a fix-all solution.

Forrester’s Zero Trust Model of information security helps teams develop robust prevention, detection and incident response capabilities to protect their company's vital digital business ecosystem. This report will help security pros understand the technologies best suited to empowering and extending their Zero Trust initiatives and will detail how Forrester sees this model and framework growing and evolving.

The customer sought a data analysis tool to correlate application data with network and security data to spot service-impacting anomalies. They did not have an accurate picture of interoperability between applications and the underlying infrastructure.

This national insurance provider had three problems to tackle regarding their firewall policies. First, the number of rules under management was overwhelming staff and processes. They needed to increase visibility and effectiveness of their firewall change request/workflow ticketing process. And they also need help maintaining compliance PCI DSS requirements.

Each time this Global MSP engaged a new customer, they had to onboard the firewalls – sometimes hundreds per engagement – into their network. Part of the onboarding process required assessing the policies against internal best practices – a manual, line-by-line process that took an average of 16 hours/firewall and was extremely error-prone.